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2025/07/16 Samvera Accessibility WG Meeting Notes

Samvera Community Wiki

2025/07/16 Samvera Accessibility WG Meeting Notes

Attendees:

  • Kate Lynch

  • Nick Homenda

  • Rebekah Kati

  • Christine Peterson

Regrets:

  • Margaret Mellinger

  • Robin Ruggabear

Agenda and notes:

  • Fable testing planning

    • We have timeslots in August and September for testing.

    • 1-hour timeslot per test

    • We give the tester a script of things to do ahead of time.

    • The user tests while talking through their actions and thoughts.

    • What sorts of accessibility tests do we want to do? Screen reader? Switch inputs? Others?

    • What do we want to test, and in what systems?

      • Hyrax and Hyku are very similar but can look quite different if you change the theming in Hyku

        • Want to test if the Hyku public themes are accessible; this likely won’t even take a full hour.

      • Likely don’t want to test Universal Viewer.

      • Hyrax testing – we could set up access to one of the Nurax instances ahead of time so that we don’t sink time during the test into getting them set up.

        • Brainstorm the things to test in Hyrax

          • Public-facing

            • Search for a term: “image”

            • View a work from search results: “image and PDF in UV”

            • Turn pages in the page viewer

            • Download the PDF in “Items” named “davis_2014__1.pdf”

            • View the collection this item is in: “testing collection with flexible metadata”

            • Sort the items in this collection by date modified descending

            • Return to the homepage

            • Show all collections

            • Limit these results to just collections with Resource Type “Audio” using the facet menu

            • Navigate to the contact form

            • Log in to the repository

          • Backend-facing

            • View the dashboard

            • Create a new work

            • View your works

      • Avalon has an accessibility testing strategy/workflow in-house at Indiana. Their goal is to hit WCAG AA. They are taking it page-by-page currently for testing. Using a mix of SiteImprove, VoiceOver, and other browser plugin-based tools.

        • Preference is to use the Fable testing for Hyku and Hyrax.

  • Roadmap discussion

    • The VPAT draft for Hyrax is as good as it can be at this point with the knowledge that we have.

  • Amount of time that people have spent finding accessibility issues

    • If there is something more automated for accessibility testing and issue detection, we may be able to apply for funding.

    • Consider asking the Board about this. Is this something we could do, and if so should this group be investigating which tool(s) to use?

    • Example: SiteImprove, or other paid tools.

    • BBC has an Open Source tool that is specific to EU sites but it is something we should consider looking at.